Religious actors, civil society, and the development agenda: The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion

This article uses the World Bank\u27s engagement with religious actors to analyse their differentiated role in setting the development agenda raising three key issues. First, engagements between international financial institutions (IFIs) and religious actors are formalised thus excluding many of the actors embedded within communities in the South. Secondly, the varied politics of religious actors in development are rarely articulated and a single position is often presented. Thirdly, the potential for development alternatives from religious actors excluded from these engagements is overlooked, due in part to misrecognition of the mutually constitutive relationship between secular and sacral elements in local contexts

Modular Forms on the Double Half-Plane

We formulate a notion of modular form on the double half-plane for half-integral weights and explain its relationship to the usual notion of modular form. The construction we provide is compatible with certain physical considerations due to the second author.Comment: 17 pages: Minor corrections in text (due to a helpful referee), updated affiliations. Accepted for publication in the International Journal for Number Theory (IJNT

Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the Globular Cluster System around NGC 5846

Bimodal globular cluster metallicity distributions have now been seen in a handful of large ellipticals. Here we report the discovery of a bimodal distribution in the dominant group elliptical NGC 5846, using the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The two peaks are located at V-I = 0.96 and 1.17, which roughly correspond to metallicities of [Fe/H] = -1.2 and -0.2 respectively. The luminosity functions of the blue and red subpopulations appear to be the same, indicating that luminosity does not correlate with metallicity within an individual galaxy's globular cluster system. Our WFPC2 data cover three pointings allowing us to examine the spatial distribution of globular clusters out to 30 kpc (or 2.5 galaxy effective radii). We find a power law surface density with a very flat slope, and a tendency for globular clusters to align close to the galaxy minor axis. An extrapolation of the surface density profile, out to 50 kpc, gives a specific frequency S_N = 4.3 +/- 1.1. Thus NGC 5846 has a much lower specific frequency than other dominant ellipticals in clusters but is similar to those in groups. The central galaxy regions reveal some filamentary dust features, presumably from a past merger or accretion of a gas-rich galaxy. This dust reaches to the very nucleus and so provides an obvious source of fuel for the radio core. We have searched for proto-globular clusters that may have resulted from the merger/accretion and find none. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of our results for globular cluster formation mechanisms.Comment: 22 pages, Latex. To be published in the Astronomical Journal. Full paper available at http://www.ucolick.org/~forbes/home.htm

Umbral Moonshine and the Niemeier Lattices

In this paper we relate umbral moonshine to the Niemeier lattices: the 23 even unimodular positive-definite lattices of rank 24 with non-trivial root systems. To each Niemeier lattice we attach a finite group by considering a naturally defined quotient of the lattice automorphism group, and for each conjugacy class of each of these groups we identify a vector-valued mock modular form whose components coincide with mock theta functions of Ramanujan in many cases. This leads to the umbral moonshine conjecture, stating that an infinite-dimensional module is assigned to each of the Niemeier lattices in such a way that the associated graded trace functions are mock modular forms of a distinguished nature. These constructions and conjectures extend those of our earlier paper, and in particular include the Mathieu moonshine observed by Eguchi-Ooguri-Tachikawa as a special case. Our analysis also highlights a correspondence between genus zero groups and Niemeier lattices. As a part of this relation we recognise the Coxeter numbers of Niemeier root systems with a type A component as exactly those levels for which the corresponding classical modular curve has genus zero.Comment: 181 pages including 95 pages of Appendices; journal version, minor typos corrected, Research in the Mathematical Sciences, 2014, vol.

Convective shutdown in a porous medium at high Rayleigh number

Convection in a closed domain driven by a dense buoyancy source along the upper boundary soon starts to wane owing to the increase of the average interior density. In this paper, theoretical and numerical models are developed of the subsequent long period of shutdown of convection in a two-dimensional porous medium at high Rayleigh number Ra\mathit{Ra}. The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, the relationship between this slowly evolving ‘one-sided’ shutdown system and the statistically steady ‘two-sided’ Rayleigh–Bénard (RB) cell is investigated. Numerical measurements of the Nusselt number Nu\mathit{Nu} from an RB cell (Hewitt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 108, 2012, 224503) are very well described by the simple parametrization Nu=2.75+0.0069Ra\mathit{Nu}= 2. 75+ 0. 0069\mathit{Ra}. This parametrization is used in theoretical box models of the one-sided shutdown system and found to give excellent agreement with high-resolution numerical simulations of this system. The dynamical structure of shutdown can also be accurately predicted by measurements from an RB cell. Results are presented for a general power-law equation of state. Secondly, these ideas are extended to model more complex physical systems, which comprise two fluid layers with an equation of state such that the solution that forms at the (moving) interface is more dense than either layer. The two fluids are either immiscible or miscible. Theoretical box models compare well with numerical simulations in the case of a flat interface between the fluids. Experimental results from a Hele-Shaw cell and numerical simulations both show that interfacial deformation can dramatically enhance the convective flux. The applicability of these results to the convective dissolution of geologically sequestered CO2{\mathrm{CO} }_{2} in a saline aquifer is discussed

Searching for Earth-mass planets around α\alpha Centauri: precise radial velocities from contaminated spectra

This work is part of an ongoing project which aims to detect terrestrial planets in our neighbouring star system $\alpha$ Centauri using the Doppler method. Owing to the small angular separation between the two components of the $\alpha$ Cen AB binary system, the observations will to some extent be contaminated with light coming from the other star. We are accurately determining the amount of contamination for every observation by measuring the relative strengths of the H-$\alpha$ and NaD lines. Furthermore, we have developed a modified version of a well established Doppler code that is modelling the observations using two stellar templates simultaneously. With this method we can significantly reduce the scatter of the radial velocity measurements due to spectral cross-contamination and hence increase our chances of detecting the tiny signature caused by potential Earth-mass planets. After correcting for the contamination we achieve radial velocity precision of $\sim 2.5\,\mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}$ for a given night of observations. We have also applied this new Doppler code to four southern double-lined spectroscopic binary systems (HR159, HR913, HR7578, HD181958) and have successfully recovered radial velocities for both components simultaneously.Comment: accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology (published by Cambridge University Press); will appear in a revised form, subsequent to editorial input by Cambridge University Pres